Visions from the West at the Instituto Cervantes in Rabat
The Instituto Cervantes of Rabat in Morocco invites to this first session of the 'Chair of the Instituto Cervantes of Rabat. Islam and women: discourses, counter-discourses and practices'. This debate aims to quench the thirst to listen to two Moroccans on a subject that never ceases to be topical: the Western vision of Islam and women.
The participants will be a novelist and essayist, a Catalan of Moroccan origin, who suffers the weight of the gaze of the other with whom she lives, and who is challenged to reflect on feminisms and Islam, and an immigrant researcher who, from his position as a university researcher, is dedicated to analysing Western discourses on women and Islam.
The debate in the auditorium of the Instituto Cervantes in Rabat will be moderated by Fatiha Benlabbah and Rajae El Khamsi and will include the points of view of Professor Mohamed El Madkouri and the writer Najat El Hachmi, who will attend via videoconference.
Mohamed El Madkouri Maataoui, full professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, holds a double doctorate from the UAM and the UCM. He has devoted several studies to representations of "the other" in general and of women in particular. His research includes 'La representación del "moro" en el chiste español' (2003), 'Mujer árabe y prensa española : representaciones de un colectivo migrante' (2004), 'La traducción del otro en la prensa española' (2005), 'El otro entre Nosotros: el musulmán en la prensa' (2006), 'Conceptualización, representación y presentación de la integración y asimilación del Otro en España' (2014), 'Implicaciones culturales de la interpretación de referencias sexuales en el ámbito social' (2014), 'La cultura en la configuración del chiste sobre la mujer' (2016), or 'El discurso femenino en los movimientos sociales de la Primavera árabe' (2017). His latest book published (2020, Editorial Síntesis) is 'Lingüística aplicada a la traducción' (Linguistics applied to translation). Mohamed El Madkouri is also president of the Spanish Association of Trainers, Researchers and Professionals of Translation and Interpreting in Public Services.
Najat El Hachmi is a Spanish writer of Moroccan origin. She won the 2008 Ramon Llull Novel Prize for 'L'Ultim patriarca'. In 2004 she published 'Jo també sóc catalana' where she deals with the integration of immigrants in Catalonia in relation to culture, language and religion. In 2015 she published 'La hija extranjera' (The Foreign Daughter), which won her the Sant Joan Novel Prize, the third best-endowed literary prize in Catalan. In 2019 she published her essay in Spanish 'Siempre han hablado por nosotras'. In 2021 she won the prestigious Nadal Prize, with the novel 'El lunes nos querrán'.
This session will take place in the auditorium of the Instituto Cervantes in Rabat on 6 October 2021 from 18:30 to 20:00. Due to COVID-19 prevention measures, the capacity of the public is restricted to 50 attendees who will access the event on a first-come, first-served basis. For the same reasons, only attendees wearing masks will be accepted.
Submitted by José Antonio Sierra, Hispanismo adviso
